This chapter considers the promises and potential pitfalls of the digital era for Latino/a/@/x/e literature. It begins with an exploration of the multiple iterations of the virtual project/website El Puerto Rican Embassy over the last twenty-nine years as a way to think with evolving attitudes about Puerto Rican nationalism and its relationship to Nuyorican identity. The conversation then shifts to think about the potential dangers of relying on digital archives as safe repositories for Latino/a/@/x/e history. After all, with these new forms of digital power, come new responsibilities, including the need for a steady stream of resources. As exciting as the possibilities for redefining Latin@s online may be, the precarity that Adela Vázquez, Jaime Cortez, and Pato Hebert’s queer, Cuban comic Sexile (2004) currently faces makes clear that the expectation that cyberspace serve as a catchall for the margins may foster a false sense of security that risks reproducing new forms of digital exile.

This chapter links Haiti’s ambivalent place in the Latinx literary imaginary to deep-seated anxieties about race, nation, and belonging entangled in representations of Haiti since the Haitian Revolution and the formation of the Latinx literary canon. It argues that in last thirty years the historical exclusion of Haitian American literature from the Latinx literary canon has come increasingly under pressure due to shifting terminology, the broad turn toward recuperating legacies of the Haitian revolution across academic disciplines, and the institutionalization of Dominican American Studies in the United States. The chapter concludes with close readings of Julia Alvarez’s memoir A Wedding in Haiti (2012), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s poem “Tourist,” and Loida Maritza Pérez’s novel Geographies of Home (2000) to illustrate both the possible pitfalls and promising potential of transnational approaches linking the literatures of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their diasporas.

A strategic, organized, and coordinated attack on the basic tenets of higher education in the United States was launched in late 2020 when the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping was issued by Donald Trump, prohibiting most diversity training in federal agencies. Republican-controlled states quickly enshrined laws to limit how public schools, colleges, universities, and even individual faculty members can discuss racism, sexism, and gender identity in educational institutions. Characterized as a “culture war,” this conservative backlash to antidiscrimination inroads actually constitutes a massive resistance movement, the likes of which perhaps has not been seen in the United States since the civil rights era. Black writers and intellectuals have a long history of confronting the massive resistance of whiteness. Black nonfiction writings, in particular, offer revealing critiques and warnings about the impacts of whiteness in the modern world.

This chapter provides a preliminary Latinx literary history of both the representation of Latinxs in video games and how games shape narratives of Latinidad in the twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how non-Latinxs have dominated Latinx narratives and representation, shaping a narrow concept of who is Latinx and what it means to live as a Latinx person. While AAA games continue to circulate stereotyped images of Latinxs, more recent game narratives authored by Latin American and Latinx creators and distributed through independent publishers challenge these representations. The chapter provides close readings of Guacamelee! and Guacamelee! 2 from Drinkbox Studies and Minority Media’s Papo & Yo, both created by Latin American immigrants to North America. These games subvert gaming tropes and use characterization and worldbuilding to showcase the diversity of Latinidades. Finally, the chapter assesses video games that expand representation (including AfroLatinidades and trans Latinidades) as well as narratives that use ludic structures, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir and Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders.

Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.

This chapter looks at the interplay between Latinx literature written in Spanish or English, and discusses translanguaging and the complexities of translating an accented or bilingual text into either Spanish or English. The chapter also discusses the vicissitudes of self-translation and the global dimension of Latinx literatures as well as the translation of Latinx literature into languages other than English or Spanish, specifically into German. These aspects of translation promote a reading of Latinx literature beyond the merely representational, highlighting the critical roles of cultural production, distribution, and the literary marketplace instead.

Some key dates in recent US history help us understand the paths of Latinx literature since 1992. This chapter considers five key years: 1992, 1994, 2001, 2008, and 2016. The Columbian quincentenary catalyzed decolonial thinking as writers think about the shared histories of colonization that unite Latinx groups. The events of 1992 help frame NAFTA’s 1994 enactment as a form of neocolonialism that rewrote the terms of national belonging. 9/11 further tears the social order asunder as the US violently reacted. While some writers provide accounts of the persistent grief and trauma experienced by Latinxs after 9/11, others critique US militarism and consider Latinx complicity in state violence. Ramón Saldívar poses the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as inaugurating a period in which Latinx writers turn to speculative forms to articulate new racial imaginaries. If Obama’s election produced possibility, the 2016 presidential election stimulated Latinx writers to contest the administration’s anti-immigration policies, while other writers examine the white supremacy that underlies the administration and festers in some quarters of Latinidad.

This chapter examines an array of antebellum American literary texts for their constructions of working- and middle-class identities during the emergence of market capitalism. While establishing historical and cultural context for a number of popular novels published in the early 1850s, this case study compares the middle-class discourses of moral reform and individual responsibility expressed in conventional novels like The Old Brewery (1854) and the working-class discourses of artisan republicanism and cross-racial sympathy in sensational novels like Hot Corn (1854) and Walt Whitman’s recently discovered serial Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). The analysis reveals the ways that class-accented sensational novels develop a counternarrative to American exceptionalist ideology that was championed by the middle class through documenting the impact of larger socioeconomic forces on the lived experience of the working poor, challenging prevailing stereotypes leveled against the white working classes, and insisting that class matters.

Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of a body of literature that emplots Indigenous material realities and forms of knowledge into Latinx literature’s representational horizon. These texts mark a significant transition, moving away from an understanding of Latinx identity rooted in a mythological Indian past, and focusing instead on a diverse array of issues grounded in Indigenous identities, experiences, and epistemologies. These include explorations of the liberatory potential in transnational feminist solidarities, the thematization of contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism, the foregrounding of land-based knowledge, and the celebration of the creative power and insurgent force of the erotic. Focusing on works by Graciela Limón, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Natalie Diaz, and Alan Pelaez Lopez, the chapter argues that these writings collectively depict Latinx Indigeneity at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, raising complex issues with respect to overlapping and ongoing histories of colonization and fostering an opportunity for centering Indigenous experiences while interrogating the multiracial character of Latinidad.

This chapter attends to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as an exemplary text in the burgeoning corpus of Latinx solidarity narratives in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter focuses on the narrative innovations that Luiselli orients toward the task of envisioning new terms for pan-ethnic solidarity. The chapter shows how, at a time of renewed Latinx literary attention to the experiences of Central Americans fleeing violence in the isthmus, Lost Children Archive stylizes a narrative of pan-ethnic solidarity through strategies of scrupulous narratorial self-awareness and an ethical refusal to represent the experiences of ethnic others. In spite of these innovations, however, the chapter also demonstrates how the novel reiterates and amplifies certain essentializing expressions of unity that characterize Sanctuary Movement–era narratives from the 1980s and 1990s.

This chapter names and surveys a racially attuned subgenre of US historical fiction, the historical novel of whiteness. It studies a variety of authors from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, all of whom used the historical novel form to question the coherence and ontological status of “whiteness” as a racial concept. The essay focuses on three historically situated companies of works that epitomize the subgenre: novels of European–Native American contact from the 1820s, “color-line” novels from the Jim Crow era, and African American historical fiction from the post-1945 period. In all the novels under review, whiteness is shown to be a mutable, contingent, surprisingly unstable phenomenon, even as it is also shown to have been a powerful, all but hegemonic force throughout US history.